Strife Laps at Gates of Kenya's Privileged

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 24, 2008

NAIROBI -- With tear gas falling elsewhere in the city, John Mburu, a lawyer in a pinstriped suit, walked into a sleek coffee shop here the other day and ordered a double latte.

Police were battling demonstrators downtown, merchants were closing their shops, and protesters in another part of the Kenyan capital were pulling apart a railway line.

The post-election crisis that has swept Kenya was having a less visible effect on Mburu. He sat in a calmer neighborhood of fresh-cut lawns, lush gardens and high, guarded gates -- the trappings of the modest middle class that helped make this country one of East Africa's most stable.

But his clientele is dwindling, he said. Where he once had a predictable home life with his wife and children, he now has more than 20 relatives to care for, all of whom he evacuated by plane from western Kenya, where supporters of opposition leader Raila Odinga have been burning down villages.

Like many others in his position, Mburu is watching the comforting certainties of his upwardly mobile life being dismantled one by one, including the fundamental notion that his country had moved beyond the ethnically charged anger now seeping into his own social circles.

He has been forced by recent events to see himself not as a successful young lawyer who jets back and forth to London, but in terms he'd always hoped to escape: a Kikuyu, the ethnic group of President Mwai Kibaki, and even more uncomfortably, an object of others' wrath.

"I never knew there was this resentment," said Mburu, who voted for Kibaki but is increasingly disappointed with him. "Because I live in my own middle-class urban enclave, you know, my concerns were where to take my wife on holiday."

It has been nearly a month since Odinga accused Kibaki of stealing Kenya's Dec. 27 presidential election, unleashing a wave of protests and violence in which more than 600 people have been killed.

But as news cameras have focused on burning tires and clenched fists in Nairobi's huge slum areas, a quieter segment of Kenyan society -- including business owners, government employees and well-off professionals such as Mburu -- has begun to express dismay and even embarrassment at the image the country is projecting: a place beset by ethnic fighting, complete with bows and arrows and machetes.

One effect is that members of the middle class Kibaki helped create during his first term are growing impatient with his handling of the crisis and the continuing disruption of their own lives.

"They are a moderating influence," one opposition official said, expressing hope that such people might soften Kibaki's position.

Unlike the rowdy, underemployed protesters who are Odinga's foot soldiers and who say they have nothing to lose by continuing their fight, many Kenyans say they have a lot to lose if the instability continues: jobs, education, business and, in some cases, stock market investment returns and shopping trips to Dubai.

"We are getting tired of it," said Joseph Mwangi, an accountant who owes his job to the tourism industry that boomed under Kibaki, but who was among a stream of people leaving downtown Nairobi during a protest last week. "We are fed up. I'm in the hotel business, and we have no business at the moment. We don't know if we're going to lose our job or what will happen."

Even a hard-core opposition supporter, Joseph Ogal, acknowledged he was skipping most opposition protests to attend engineering classes.

"It's very technical," he said. "I do not think that I can miss it."

Beyond bearing the material losses stemming from the political crisis, many middle-rung Kenyans, particularly Kikuyus, are struggling to reconcile the hopeful image they had of Kenya with the bleaker reality they face now.

"Life has really changed in the last three weeks," said Mburu, who specializes in land transactions and debt collection. "Before the 27th, my concerns were: When am I playing golf?" Now I'm hearing that so-and-so's house was burned by so-and-so's brother. That brings a feeling."

He is from the western city of Eldoret, where he went to school and played sports with men who are now among gangs of opposition supporters torching Kikuyu houses.

In the days after the disputed election, Mburu found himself frantically evacuating about two dozen relatives, including his mother and grandmother, who had been forced to flee machete-wielding mobs.

Then last week, he heard that his grandmother's farm had been burned to the ground. His childhood memories of the place, all the stories he'd heard about it growing up, were thrown into question.

He had always thought of it with pride as the land his family had managed to buy from British settlers in the 1960s, a place he might inherit someday.

Now he was being forced to see the old farm as an example of Kikuyu privilege.

Kalenjin gangs supporting Odinga, who is a Luo, have gone on a land-grabbing rampage, accusing Kikuyu settlers of unduly acquiring land with the help of Kenya's first president, Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu.

"One thing I'm trying to accustom myself to is that I can't go back to that place," Mburu said. "Psychologically, I can't."

Instead of planning his next vacation in South Africa, he is worrying about whether a hotel his mother owns in Eldoret might be burned down. Instead of investing in vacation property in the coastal city of Mombasa, he is looking to rent a place where his homeless relatives can live.

And the same tensions that have exploded in the hard-luck slum areas of Nairobi have begun to spill over into his world of silk ties and leather loafers. At a recent gathering of the local law society, he said, his colleagues divided up along ethnic lines, with Kikuyus arguing on behalf of Kibaki, and Luos and those of other ethnic groups backing Odinga.

"As much as we want to cover it in ideology and high-sounding philosophy, you could tell," Mburu said. "It's more civilized, of course. We didn't have machetes. But you could see. The lines were there."

The political strife has made him question his middle-class life. He wonders whether he has succumbed to the tribal thinking he describes as "primitive" and whether he really does owe his privileges to the fact that he is Kikuyu.

"I'm asking, 'Have I benefited?' " he said.

His answer is generally no, though he concedes that a rarefied circle of old-money, establishment Kikuyus has benefited.

With the election crisis dragging on, he has come to see the conflict as a power struggle among political elites, in which the poor and, increasingly, the middle class suffer.

Mburu noted that the stock market is faltering, that the Kenyan shilling is weak, that an initial public offering of a major cellphone company has had to be adjusted to reflect political uncertainties.

An economy that had grown by an impressive 6 percent annually in recent years is losing an estimated $80 million each day that businesses and transportation networks are shut down.

"I'm angry at the government," Mburu said. "I'm angry at the political leaders. And of course, I'm angry with Kenyans for having allowed this to happen."